I'm starting my IRAF packaging adventure again (I spoke
with the maintainer of the current binary-only "contrib"
IRAF package, Zed Pobre, a year or two ago [CC'd, Hi Zed,
I'm back], and the situation seems fairly unchanged -- it
is "contrib" because he was not able to build it from
source, not because that is forbidden by licensing. I may
have a bit more insight into the upstream source providers,
so I'm going to see if I can handle it now.) I've also
mentioned this to Mike Fitzpatrick who's pretty much the
upstream maintainer at NOAO, and he at least seems sanguine
about it. ;-)
One problem is that there is no source .tgz file for IRAF,
there are instead three, and they are versioned by location,
not name (i.e. you will find same-named archives in each
of the version directories on the FTP server, but they are
different files -- I'm building IRAF 2.12, BTW):
hs.pcix.gen.gz (Host System Interface Sources)
is.port.gen.gz (IRAF Core Sources)
ns.port.gen.gz (NOAO Package Sources)
(yes, they're actually tar.gz format)
To make matters worse, if and when I get around to building
for platforms other than i386, I may need variants of the
hs.*.gen.gz package as well.
I propose to resolve this by repacking my unpacked sources,
into a more-conformant source .tgz format. Is that what is
meant by a "Debian Native Package"?
To add to the mayhem, there is a note which states that an
NSF policy change has indeed made some important components
of IRAF non-free, so I infer that a free version will need
to remove the affected components. But I intend to attack
that as a separate problem from the initial build. It does
underscore the need for a cleaned-up new distribution
package, though.
Part of the reason for this mess, of course, is that the
source package I propose to make will be on the order of
17 MB in size, which, historically at least, has been
considered inconveniently large for internet downloading.
Can I just tell dh_make to make this corrected archive,
using the native option? Or do I need to be more clever
than that?
i.e.:
# Unpack the upstream sources
mkdir iraf-2.12
cd iraf-2.12
tar zxf ../hs.pcix.gen.gz
tar zxf ../is.port.gen.gz
mkdir noao
cd noao
tar zxf ../../ns.port.gen.gz
# '*'
# Run dh_make with "native" option:
dh_make --email anansi@anansispaceworks --native --single
# Edit the files in debian/, set up debian/rules to do the
build properly
# Then just run the buildpackage script
dpkg-buildpackage -rfakeroot -sgpg
Have I got that right? Or should I be manually creating
the new source .tgz distribution at the point labeled '*'
above?
Advice, hand-holding, and general moral support much
appreciated. ;-)
Cheers,
Terry
--
Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com )
Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com